latoga labs

As I leaked out early this morning via Twitter, VMware has a Cyber Monday deal on Fusion.   Visit the VMware store and enter the coupon code “CyberMondayDeal“.  You have to hurry as this offer expires at 11:59PM PT today.

If you happen to be a user of Parallels or Virtual PC 7.0 and want to upgrade to Fusion, there is also a competitive upgrade rebate that is going on.

If you combine the Cyber Monday Deal with the competitive upgrade rebate, you can get Fusion for 9.99! (not including tax/s&h)

I have been running a Virtual Machine on my laptop daily for over 3 years now and been using it regularly for over 6 years (well before joining VMware); since moving to the Mac, Fusion has allowed me to keep leveraging virtualization locally on my MacBook Pro  to boost my productivity.  Use these deals to pick up your copy of Fusion today.

A few days ago IBM Announced Plans to Acquire Transative.  I wrote about Transative’s Solaris Application virtualization technology recently, it is a wonderful way for companies to maintain their investment in Solaris based applications while minimizing their dependency (risk) upon Sun.

IBM’s purchase of Transative is a brilliant strategic way to further minimize a competitor in the market while not forcing a painful forklift upgrade upon the customer base.  “Sure, we’ll sell you new IBM X86 based hardware, and then we’ll simply continue to run all your Solaris apps within the Transative virtaulized wrapper.  Upgrade those applications at your leisure when (and if) it makes sense.”

Virtualization continues to be a game changer in more ways than originally expected.

VMware is holding a pair of Virtualization Forums, one day mini-conference designed to bring together virtualization experts and clients from within a region of the United States.  There are two Forums happening in December:

• December 3, 2008: San Diego
• December 11, 2008: Boston

A customer of mine attending one last year in Atlanta and indicated it was an excellent networking and learning event.  If you happen to be in one of these two cities, look into attending the Virtualization Forum.

VMware recently announced the Public Beta of VMware Converter 4.0.  Converter 4.0 will support physical to virtual (p2v) conversion of Linux and W2k8 system.  For more information and to sign up for the Beta, see the full announcment on the VMware Converter Community Forum.

Another release today from VMware: Lab Manager 3.0.1 was recenty released.  While this is a maintenance release, some of the items inlcuded in this release are:

• Support for running Lab Manager on English (US, UK, AUS), French, German, Italian, and Japanese versions of Microsoft Windows 2003
• Optimization for higher scalability and lower response time
• Support for VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3.5 Update 3
• Ability to transfer ownership of Lab Manager objects such as network templates, virtual machine templates, configurations, and media files between different organizations.

Full details about this release can be found in the Release Notes.

(Unfortunately, this announcement comes a day late for my customer who was upgrading his LM2.x installation to 3.0 last night…  :-O ).